1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a support apparatus for the sense of vision that displays images taken by a plurality of cameras.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, a monitoring image display device is known which includes, for example: a plurality image pickup devices that have differing detection wavelength bands; a plurality of detection devices that detect image information specific to each detection wavelength band from respective image signals that are output from the plurality of image pickup devices; an image fusion device that selectively superimposes the respective image signals output from the plurality of image pickup devices, and the respective image information output from the plurality of detection devices, and generates a fusion image; and a display device that displays the fusion image (for example, see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application, First Publication No. H08-191442).
This monitoring image display device superimposes distribution information for a high temperature zone onto a visible light camera image signal, as image information specific to each detection wavelength band, by detecting edge information by differential processing such as filtering image signals of a visible light camera, detecting high temperature zone distribution information by a binarization process with respect to infrared camera image signals, and superimposing edge information onto the infrared camera image signals.
Incidentally, in the monitoring image display device according to the example of the related art mentioned above, when image information specific to the detection wavelength bands from image signals that are output from the image pickup devices is detected, then for example in the case of executing recognition processing for edges and high temperature zones with respect to respective image signals of the visible light camera and the infrared camera, and selecting appropriate zones on the image data, the processing required for this selection is complex, and the calculation process load is increased, so that the device configuration is enlarged, and it may become difficult to display fusion images in a so-called real time manner.
Moreover, in the above mentioned prior art, the edge information is simply superimposed onto the image signal of the infrared camera, and the distribution information of the high temperature zone is superimposed onto the image signal of the visible light camera. However, in the image data for each of the respective detection wavelength bands, the locally appearing characteristics cannot be fully reflected into a fusion image, so that there is a problem in that the respective image signals output from a plurality of image pickup devices cannot be appropriately used.